Chapter Seventeen #2
But no, not anymore. Because from now on and for the remainder of my days, whenever I would think of a happy life, I would always picture this: a house by the ocean, filled with laughter and music and books. And Kai. Just Kai, right in the center of everything.
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In hindsight, it was funny to think how all of these elaborate procedures were marketed as something akin to advanced wellness treatments.
Hive itself was self-characterized as a mental health and wellness organization.
Back then, I was unable to recognize the dystopian quality of it all.
The only thing I knew was my suffering and my increasing, overwhelming need to stop this suffering. Or in my case, delete the cause of it.
It was the year I turned twenty-six when I finally had enough money saved to go through memory deletion.
Living with my brand-new trauma-free mind, I tried everything I could to claim a sense of normalcy for myself.
I stopped the antidepressants and gave up alcohol.
I woke up early, went on walks, socialized more, read better books, watched better movies.
I went to the theater and to art exhibitions.
I got tickets to all the latest and most talked-about shows.
I ate good food at good restaurants with good people.
I lived mindfully and intentionally while still pursuing excellence at work, cultivating what is considered to be a healthy sense of ambition.
Healthy, yes. And yet the more present and involved I became in my life, the more unhappy I grew with the world around me.
It was an unfamiliar kind of unhappiness, one venturing far past my individual suffering.
Now that I wasn’t struggling to survive the day, I was forced to experience it, only that there was nothing to experience here anymore.
Nothing but the homogenized concrete grayness of the city, all beauty sacrificed in the name of function, the landscape so refined it looked alien.
Had the earth always been so barren? I didn’t know. I would never know.
And during those shows I went to see, I couldn’t stay still for longer than ten minutes without checking my phone, missing the plot, wondering why I even bothered getting out of the house at all.
And at those glamorous dinner parties of mine, no one ever talked about anything except to recapitulate things we’d already been exposed to online.
Wars, violences, pollution, insults to everything humanity encompassed were all mentioned casually and in the same conversation about trends and celebrity gossip.
What was the point in debating about such things anyway when every possible political and philosophical discourse could fit into one minute of pleasingly aesthetic video content?
Why form an opinion of your own at all when you could just ask your artificially intelligent pal—the same intelligent pal that one day soon was going to render my job obsolete—to tell you exactly what you were supposed to think, knowing that its far superior subjectiveness had to be the truth?
As if we cared about truth. As if we cared about anything other than consuming our own starved souls.
Because that was life now. That was normal.
All day long, floundering helplessly in an infinite information-land, where even the concept of meaning was meaningless, where the bizarre was an opening hook, where our basic human emotions were exploited for views, where our attention spans were exchanged for currency that would later be spent to perpetuate this endless cycle of unreality we called real life.
I could not live like this anymore. I could not stand my own overstimulated passivity, my sick inability to do anything about anything.
My life had become a tedious, soul-crushing cycle of going to work, paying my bills, hearing about the new horrible thing happening to the world, dissociating in the middle of the conversation so I wouldn’t have to think about the said horrible thing, and then waking up the next morning to do it all over again.
I had never felt more unlike a human being, so useless and inert.
Perhaps, I would think, it’d be better if we knew nothing.
Nothing at all. Perhaps our human minds could not survive the magnitude of disaster, pain, and injustice happening in the world all at once.
Maybe we were killing ourselves one anxiety attack at a time for things that seemed to be completely and irreversibly out of our control.
And yet, who would choose to stay blindfolded? Awareness had given us empathy, and empathy was the one most crucial quality humans had to offer to each other.
That was the dilemma. That was the question, the most important one: How do you live?
Do you kill yourself knowing everything all at once in the name of humanity, in the name of what we owe to each other as members of the human race, or do you self-preserve, shut your eyes and ears and mouth, and escape from the world?
Escape. Oh, the pure, irrepressible calm the thought of it brought me.
To rest, yes, to retreat from everything.
No more standards to uphold, no clients to see, no bills to pay, no dinner dates to sit through, no more apologizing for the mere fact of existing unhappily in a fundamentally unhappy world.
A place where I could just read books, relax, and be my true unapologetic self.
At night, while Theo dissolved into medicated sleep, I would stay up asking myself, What am I missing here? Why all this emptiness, this fixation on all the worst parts of existence? Why can’t I just be happy, be good? Why am I working so hard to sustain a life that I hate?
And just before I, too, would surrender to sleep, my mind would always replay my years before the memory deletion, when my pain was still so deep and personal that I could only think of surviving it.
A mind like yours, everyone at the Public Defender’s Office had said when I announced I was leaving for a corporate firm. What a waste.
And it was a waste. Because even after all I’d sacrificed to save myself, I was still as helpless and miserable as I was at ten years old.
Because Hive did not heal me. They did not remove my trauma.
They just made me forget it, leaving me utterly unable to connect with the life I had constructed before the procedure.
The abuses and the choices they’d forced me to take made no sense to me anymore.
The work I did, the apartment I lived in, the man I loved, the self-preserving nature of my choices.
None of it made sense to me. It was the life of a person I did not recognize. The life of a person I despised.
And so, just a little over a year ago, I chose to escape.
I went back to Hive, this time looking for a more aggressive solution. Advanced simulated reality. The Programs, as they called them. The wellness retreats of the future.
After many exhaustive and somewhat harrowing consultations, I decided to become a part of the Nostalgia Program, which was a capsule of an innocent, perpetually youthful time, riddled with character and color.
The perfect simulation for people who’d had unhappy childhoods, or in my case, for people who’d been left with no childhood at all.
Nostalgia: Saturday morning cartoons, July afternoons going to the park and hanging out with whoever, in bed late at night trying to find the perfect ringtone for your stylish, app-free flip phone, weekends hunting down boy-band posters with your friends and that brand new silver walkman so you could listen to all your favorite CDs on the go.
A magical point in time when there was just enough technology and consumerism to make you feel excited about the next new thing but not so much as to overtake your entire life, to become your entire personality.
According to Hive specialists, Nostalgia was the perfect place to slow down, read, socialize, work enjoyably, form healthy relationships with real people, and essentially just live.
Of course, the Programs, being still at an early stage, were not without their imperfections.
Hive’s technology was used to maintain the body’s biological processes while the individuals’ consciousnesses were connected and exposed through a headset device to the same computer-generated environment, the stability of which relied on finely calibrated systems and prearranged information.
In Nostalgia, we were allowed to know only what we needed to know to make sense of the world around us, and so we were kept, individually and collectively, away from themes and concepts that had the potential to make us question the world we were living in.
And even if a concept from the real world happened to slip from our subconsciouses into the Program, it was immediately incorporated as something you read in a book or saw in a movie.
This was partly the reason why the Outside existed. Everything we didn’t understand we could simply explain through the existence of another parallel world.
Like that book I found. Acquiescence.
It was hilarious, really. The glaring unsophistication of it all. But at the same time it was what had made the Program feel so real. It was so simple that it was nearly honest. An Inside world that was constantly disturbed by a mysterious Outside force, a universe just beyond our reach: reality.
That was the point. Everything about the Inside was supposed to be a simplified, almost infantilized version of reality.
Streets named after colors and childhood games.
Jobs teenagers would dream of. People with no last names.
Oh, how I used to crave such anonymity, to be anyone other than my father’s daughter and enter a world where I was wholly untainted by the past.